I’m writing this series for several reasons.
Over the past few years, many people have asked why I am no longer serving as a church pastor. Some have asked gently and personally. Others have taken, well, a different approach. What all these folks have in common, though, is a concern for how my faith may have evolved. This series is, in part, an attempt to answer that question.
It’s also something more personal than that.
Writing has become a way for me to process my own thoughts, questions, and experiences. So, in addition to being an attempt to distill what I actually believe at this point in my life, in many ways this series is also therapeutic for me.
I am simply gathering threads …
At the same time, I want to offer another way of understanding the Christian faith – one that is rarely emphasized within American Evangelical church culture, but is deeply ancient, historically rooted, and fully orthodox within many streams of Christianity. These ideas have been shaped by countless Christian theologians, pastors, philosophers, contemplatives, and prophets throughout history. Very little of what I will say here is original to me. I am simply gathering threads that others have already woven and sharing how they have transformed the way that I presently understand God, humanity, and all creation.
This is not an academic work, though I will include a few sources at the end of the series for any who may wish to explore further. Nor am I trying to convince anyone to adopt my particular theological framework. In fact, one of the things that I have come to distrust most is certainty itself – especially the kind of certainty that divides the world neatly into “us and them”, right and wrong, worthy and unworthy. The older I get, the more I believe that spiritual (and, in fact, all) maturity looks less like possessing absolute certainty and more like growing in curiosity, compassion, nuance, courage, and openness to mystery. What I write, then, is offered in that spirit: not as a statement of absolute truth, but as a simple and honest reflection of where I presently find myself.
…we divide ourselves endlessly...
Twenty centuries after Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, our world remains deeply fractured. Violence, greed, nationalism, tribalism, scapegoating, exploitation, and the pursuit of power continue to shape not just society, but so much of the church itself. We divide ourselves endlessly into categories of good and bad, enemy and ally, insider and outsider, righteous and condemned. We harm one another, we harm the earth, and through it all, we harm ourselves. Often, we justify these behaviors in the name of God.
Yet, how to reconcile these realities with the life and teachings of Jesus?
As I study Jesus, I see him calling humanity towards something radically different: towards reconciliation, compassion, healing, forgiveness, inclusion, nonviolence, and what the Hebrew scriptures call shalom – peace, goodness, and wholeness between each of us and God, each of us and ourselves, each of us and all others, and each of us with creation itself.
Along this journey – in large part because of my own ongoing therapeutic work – new understandings of fear, trauma, anxiety, tribalism, and scapegoating have profoundly impacted the way that I read scripture and understand the interconnectedness of religion and human behavior. These insights have helped me to see more clearly why humanity struggles so deeply to embody love, and why the teachings of Jesus are at once profoundly simple and extraordinarily difficult to live out.
This series is an attempt to explore those ideas, and if we are willing to read with new eyes - with a prophetic imagination - to discover that a more beautiful world is possible.
I love you and I'm so glad that you're here!
Coming soon - “Chapter One: A Better Way of Seeing”.
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